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I'm not implying, I'm saying that perl 6 is to perl what "heaven's gate" was to Michael Cimino's directorial career.

Perl 5 is great, but the sheer amount of resources that have been put into vapourwareperl6 is mind-boggling. And *please* don't point me to some project saying "you can use it now" because you *know* perl 6 is not production quality.

To clarify: There has been a little bit of progress on perl 5, namely perl 5.10. Perl 6 is a disaster, a train-wreck, a lot of sweat (including mine) lost forever in a project that should have been finished 8 years ago.

Yet here you are, wasting even more time, and in an ignoble effort to boot, namely, devaluing the sweat of the people who have come after you – not to mention that you’re exposing yourself to the risk of having to eat your words. Hopefully you’re at least enjoying it?

How in the world would you have possibly finished Perl 6 eight years ago, with the resources available eight years ago, the volunteer effort available eight years ago, and the knowledge of Perl 6 available eight years ago?

How long should it take to invent a lexically overrideable, self-hosting grammar engine and build a complete, coherent, consistent language around that? If you're doing that in 2001, you don't have the advantage of hindsight and h

To clarify: There has been a little bit of progress on perl 5, namely perl 5.10.

Somehow I don't believe that Moose, DBIx::Class, Catalyst, etc. reasonably qualify as "a little bit of progress". I think they represent significant advancements. (And if I'm not mistaken, many of the ideas in Moose directly stem from concepts coming out of the design and implementation of Perl 6.)

I also notice you have thus far not listed "any of the programming languages that have come and gone in [the past ten years]", pe

I was not clear enough. I am a big fan of Moose, etc and did not want to belittle what perl 5 is. I just wanted to point out that, by wasting so much time with Perl 6, we lost a lot of work that could have gone to perl 5.

Now I see the problem. You're conflating estimates from past project leaders with what "should" happen. This is an easy discrepancy to solve: Those past estimates were terribly wrong. Don't carry on the expectation that those estimates were correct or reasonable.

casuistics over what "stable" and "done" mean instead of committing to an actual release date.

If you can't define what "stable" and "done" are, then how can you expect an actual release date?

Of course it didn't "go" - no language really "goes" in a strict sense; but think about them as waves of interest in different languages, that's what I was thinking about when I wrote the original post.

Walter Bright started D in 1999. The first public release of Ruby occurred in 1995. Guido announced Python 3000 in spring 2000, several months before the summer 2000 announcement of Perl 6 (unless you count Topaz, which doesn't count). Clojure may or may not count, being a Lisp dialect. Scala counts if you throw out Odersky's work on its predecessor in 1999.